Monday, February 09, 2009

The problem with single-mothers.

Every couple of months or so, there is some new report about how terrible childhood is today and and how it is all the fault of single mothers.

The latest one was a in report last week entitled the Good Childhood Inquiry conducted by the Children's Society, who are closely allied to the Church of England. This was misrepresented in the press as a doom and gloom report advocating traditional family values. It's actually not nearly so bad, they looked a wide range of issues and made a great number of recommendations to government, but it did produce the following statistic which was repeated in every news story about it

Although this wasn't said in the report, this statistic was used elsewhere, as statistics like it always are, to argue that.

A masculine parent is so important that without one living in the same house, a child is doomed.

The marriage of one's parents is vital for a happy and healthy childhood or

We should readopt traditional family values – whatever the heck they are - for the good of the nation's children.

It goes without saying that few people choose single parenthood – although it is a risk that everyone takes when they become a parent. Raising children is hard work and expensive, so two people are better than one (three would be better than two, come to mention it). Meanwhile, most single-parents didn't plan on being so. Most of them started parenthood in a long-term relationship, and most of the small number who did not probably didn't plan to be parents at all.

So it is not ideal, but it happens and always has. And the reasons that it is a problem in our society at this moment in time are not to do with the morality of divorce, premarital sex or anything like that. This is mostly to do with poverty.

Most single-parents are women. Not all, but most, and this is important. Apart from anything else it enables various stereotypes about women using their magical eyelash-fluttering child-bearing ability to exploit either the state or men for financial gain. The fact that for every single mother there is a father who took part in the baby-making activity (I believe that letters to the stork still require a joint signature) is generally neglected.

For not-unrelated cultural reasons, women earn on average just three quarters what men do. So your Mum and Dad couple working the same hours will be typically two and a third times better off than Mum as the sole provider. Out of which must come full rent, utilities and so on.

Single mothers are at a particular disadvantage among female workers. The demands of childcare mean that they are more likely to be working part-time or low paid flexible work, and they are going to be considered unreliable by potential employees. For many single-mothers of young children, it is not worth working – not because state benefits keep these families in the lap of luxury, but because childcare provision and working conditions in the UK are not oriented towards family life.

Fathers can provide, but the absent father's life is not a particularly cheap. Unless Dad is a high-earner, he is unlikely to be able to afford to contribute much towards two lots of rents or mortgages, utilities and so on. As a weekend-parent, Dad is likely to feel under particular pressure to provide treats and entertainment, which are also costly - his pot is unlikely to be overflowing. Plus, according to the Children's Society report 28% of children had no contact with their father three years after their parents' separation. Some men do struggle for access, family law is often applied in a sexist way in favour of mothers, but no contact at all is abandonment.

If there is money, everything is different. But poverty is a major factor in initial family breakdown, so poorer people are more likely to be in these circumstances to begin with.

Anyway, your average single-parent is a woman who is financially hard up. This dictates a hell of a lot about her life and the lives of her children.

Money dictates where she can live. If she is on benefits or mode average wages, she is likely to live in cheap rented accommodation or social housing. Such housing clusters poorer people together. Social housing, as it is, has a whole heap of social and pscyhological issues for the tenants – something Margaret Thatcher realised, but attempted to resolve by selling most of it off. This means that social housing is more stigmatised and isolated than ever. Some of it is very good, but some families find themselves forced by circumstances into run-down estates or tower blocks which are bad environments for all sorts of obvious reasons to do with safe places to play, vulnerability to crime and criminal influence and adult role models. A mother who doesn't work is not necessarily a bad example, but if all one's adult friends and neighbours don't work either, that's a problem.

Money dictates what a mother can do. We had a patch when we were kids – the last recession – where my family were broke, Dad was out of work and the house was on the verge of repossession. When I got ten pound note for Christmas, I swapped it for the fiver in my mother's purse. We had no car, the buses were expensive, but we all had second-hand bikes. So we used to cycle all over the town and its outskirts, to free museums, the library, parks, to visit family member and so on. If we didn't have somewhere safe to keep our bikes, or even if the roads in the town were as busy as they are now, our world would have been much much smaller.

There are a lot of things you can do for free, but even where we lived in Ipswich, the library was a good three-quarters of an hour's walk away. The museum would have been a day's hike (although it did have a giraffe so it was worth it). But then when Dad got a job and we eventually had a car, we could go to castles, the seaside, to forests and nature reserves – not expensive outings, we always took our own food, but the ability to move about really matters to one's quality of life.

Money dictates what kinds of relationships she can have. Parenthood complicates romantic relationships as it is, but poverty complicates it even more. Women's increasing financial independence has had huge implications in terms of equality and physical safety within live-in relationships. When women have the economic power to leave and live comfortably alone, they are generally treated better – not beaten up so often, not expected to play a deferential role and so on.

A single-parent on income-related benefits loses a massive chunk of her money as soon as a chap moves in. She and her children then become dependent on his income, overnight. He cannot merely contribute towards the rent; he must either pay it all or not live there at all. And this power-dynamic makes women and their children vulnerable to various shades of exploitation. The more sensible solution to is to keep the relationship casual or smuggle the chap in after dark each night. This can be extremely uncomfortable for two people in love who want to make a life together, to say nothing of the children. Like I say, things were complicated enough.

So single-mothers in poverty are more likely to have messy relationships if they have any romantic relationships at all – and I'm sure it is good for one's parents to have romantic relationships, just like other grown-ups. Money makes all the difference. If a single-mother has a good independent income, romance can progress at a natural pace. In poverty, she must either recognise the disincentives to committed relationships or leave herself vulnerable to exploitation.

The disadvantages experienced by children in single-parent households have nothing to do with any traditional family structure having been an ideal. We have always had odd-shaped families, relationships have always broken down and people have always died prematurely, but for most of human history, we have not placed the entire responsibility for a child's upbringing on two biological parents. We have also accepted that looking after the wee buggers is a valuable contribution to the group as a whole. Reproduction is by no means an altruistic act, but we have made it very much more selfish than it ought to be.

We need to improve education so that both men and women take their reproductive responsibilities very seriously from the start. We need to make sure that already poor young women have more appealing options than having babies straight out of school – not to reignite the hypocritical stigma of the unmarried mother. Gender equality makes relationships happier and longer lasting and makes things far more manageable when they don't work out.

But we also need more flexible working conditions for men and women, better public transport and a more imaginative wellfare state (not necessarily a more generous one) – disabled adults could use all this too, by the way, we all do, but the kids are kind of important.

8 comments:

It's always interesting to know what this is being compared with - presumably "the average of children whos parents don't separate". But there are other reasons. Parents who don't separate are more likely to be in a loving, stable, non-violent relationship.

The key question ought to be "is it better for that child to remain in a home with arguments/rows or to have a loving stable background only living with one parent?". Plus, if the parents are actually capable of putting the child first, they ought to manage to work out some access/ joint custody or something, and not use each other to score points.

An interesting post. You've come up with some good points."The fact that for every single mother there is a father who took place in the baby-making activity" is no longer relevant in this day and age.I may be going off the intended point, but quite a few single mothers nowdays, get pregnant by IVF.

Jack - you may be right, but sadly, I don't know. I would like to think that people who stayed together did love one another and didn't abuse one another, and so what you say is the case.

However, one thing is for sure - for children whose parents split, they've seen their parents fall out to some extent, which is bound to be a little traumatic. I've known people - children and adults - who have been relieved that their parents are divorcing, but that relief only follows something pretty bad, whether persistent ill-feeling and arguments, or violence and other forms of abuse.

Stephen - Personally, I think Spock should have stuck to his position on the USS Enterprise.

Pastlife - In the UK, they've only just lifted the clause that the role of the father should be considered before allowing IVF to take place. This has given more freedom to lesbian couples who wish to conceive, but I think the numbers for single women seeking IVF are still very very small.

I reckon it's not so tough being a single mum. My self respect is a million times restored since leaving my ex. Things were far tougher for me a few years ago. But my situation was far from the norm and yes, there are many inequalities that go with single parenting. It's certainly true I am stigmatised on all fronts by the local community, for being single, on benefits, disabled... but I am learning to really not give a stuff about all that. If I am okay, my son is okay. He is learning that there is more to life than status and money.

Hm. I grew up with all the context of being raised by a single mother for most of my life, yet with none of the stigma.

You see, my father died of cancer. My mother never remarried. So no divorce, no sexual habits that could be considered questionable by anyone (my mother had me at 50, and they'd been married about 30 years before he passed on when I was 7.) Not that I think those things should matter.

There was never trauma of watching parents fight, but a huge trauma of watching my father die. Oh, but no one stigmatizes my parents for "putting me through" that. Traumas happen to people of all ages, including kids, unfortunately. It's always bothered me that my family's history considered "innocent" and no one's fault. And I'm not considered to be particularly vulnerable or messed up. And my mother is never considered a bad mother. She, herself, never even thought of herself as a "single mother" until the day I heard her talking about how disgusting "single mothers" are and then I pointed out that she is one.

If I stayed with my ex, my son would have witnessed abuse for the rest of his life. My fears are that if i stayed, he would treat women in the future that way. He has already witnessed a lot of abuse, 2 police officer arrests and thinks police men are bad for taking his dad away. They should stop doing studies on single moms and help them with the money they spend. I am having a real tough time with behavioral issues now and he so mistreats me. My son hits me in public, runs away from me, calls me names and hes only 5. He was doing well till i refused to let his dad take him to florida. I just dont know what to do anymore....